Friday, 30 November 2012

Retro Futurism's final program Episode 5: Contemporary Futurism / Postmodern Hopelessness was broadcast 30 November 2012 and is available to stream here and download here and here. This was what was played:

Episode 5: Contemporary Futurism / Postmodern Hopelessness, the final episode of Retro Futurism, will air midnight Friday 30 November. It will look at the decline of futurism, the rise of machines and the pessimism that has crept into contemporary experimental music making. Stay tuned...

Thursday, 22 November 2012

Tonight's program - Episode 3: Urban Machines will look at the advent of consumer electronics and the futuristic music made by urban youth on these newfangled gadgets. This made for a period of considerable experiment and invention, loads of great music, and images. Here's to the latter:

Thanks for listening. Next week Friday 23 November is Episode 4: Urban Machines, looking at the small electronic boxes, gadgets and computers used by inner city dwellers to create rhythms, bleeps and pulsars to transcend urban reality.

Completely ran out of time so missed out on playing a lot, including Laurie Spiegel, Bernard Parmegiani, Pauline Oliveros, Cat Hope, and many many others.Episode 3: Improvisation and Indeterminacy airs midnight Friday 16 November.

Pioneers started with the grandpappy of twentieth century exploratory composition Arnold Schoenberg, the final movement of his Second String Quartet, considered his first deep dip into atonality. It also features a soprano, singing the words of mystic writer Stefan George, his poem Entruckung (Transport) evoking Schoenberg's reluctant voyage into the unknown and of the new freedoms - and vertigo - opened up to modern composers:

I feel the air of another planet
And faces blow over me through the dark
Faces that even now kindly turn themselves toward me.

And trees and byways that I once loved now pale
So that I hardly recognize them and you bright one
Beloved shadow - summoner of my agonies -

Are now extinguished completely in the deep glowing
so that after the rapturous tumult
with a devout countenance calming

I surrender myself in sound, circling, hovering,
Groundless gratitude and unspoken praise
Surrendering myself helplessly to the great breath.

A clamorous pain overwhelms me
In the roar of consecration where fervent cries
Beg in the dust of supplicants in tumult:

Then I see how pale clouds slip
Into clear sun-filled spaces
Clouds that embrace only the furthest mountain passes.
The earth trembles white and soft as whey.

I rise up over monstrous ravines,
I feel as if I were swimming over the last cloud
In a shimmering crystal sea.
I am only a spark of the holy fire
I am only a roar of the holy voice.

Episode 1 also introduced some of the thoughts behind Retro Futurism:

- Nostalgic, counterfactual image of what the future might have been, but is not, fueled by a dissatisfaction or discomfort with the present, to which retro-futurism provides a nostalgic contrast.

- Particularly a dissatisfaction with modern futurism, and the almost total lack of imagining of an exciting and alternative future world. In some respects, an extrapolation of the present to the future produces disappointing, or even ghastly results, exemplified in contemporary dystopian visions of the future.

- Dissatisfaction with the modern world itself. A world of high-speed air transport, computers, and space stations is (by any past standard) 'futuristic'; yet the search for alternative and perhaps more promising futures suggests a feeling that the desired or expected future has failed to materialize.

- Like some of the theories behind practitioners of Hauntology and Hypnagogic pop, Retro Futurism is fuelled by an idea that much of these early modernist, 'futurist' experiments had yet to be fully exhausted, that there is still more work to be done.

Episode 2: Lab Coats will look at electronic innovations kickstarted by composers working in academic centres and institutions in the early-mid twentieth century.